New invoicing - Remove invoice description character limit
Remove New invoicing description Character limit. Currently the limit is 4000 which isn't enough for large customer invoices.

Thanks for continuing to share your feedback on new invoicing and your needs in increasing the description field. As mentioned in my last update, currently each line of your invoice can contain up to 4,000 characters within the 'Description' field.
Though we don’t have immediate plans for extending this, our product teams have started some more research to get a deepened sense of our invoicing users for future improvements. If you'd like to share further feedback we'd love to hear from you, through our survey here.
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Nathan Lang commented
Hi Kelly, with respect, myself and many others have noted that 4,000 characters is simply not enough. Our company imports our data in from WorkflowMax2, and the detail regularly exceeds the 4,000 character limit. The only work around is to manually split this import across several line items, which is not only very time consuming, but also prone to error - very unnecessarily so.
Another area the new invoicing is worse, is the (large) size of the font, which means you see far less of the invoice at any given time. When you have an invoice that may be 6-10 pages long, this makes any editing, or any drag and drop very cumbersome - why not have an option for viewing invoice size on the screen (S, M, L font)?
Yet another area the new invoicing is poor is the deletion of the add 5, 10, 20 lines option - why delete this? Now to add lines you have to enter new information on a line-by-line basis at the bottom (I enter an 'x' in each line), rather than adding many blank lines at once that you can move and use for section headings and the like, how is that an improvement?
It is very disappointing that after using the 'old' invoicing template very happily for some 9 years, that you impart a new template on us that is simply inferior in so many ways. Please remedy the above to improve the use of the template.
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Matthew Tan commented
How have you made invoicing so much worse? Theres so many quality of life things that youve inexplicably taken away - all of which add more clicks per invoice and add time. Due date for example, why cant we default this to be X days from invoice generation? Needing to click accounts instead of tabbing through - all of these minor oversights combine to an overall worse user experience.
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Ian Winsor commented
Can you resolve the issue where you click into the amount of value fields in the new invoicing and you cannot type/edit until clicking out and then back in again!
Can you also increase the character limit in the description field. I am unable to add all the detail from my jobs to the new invoicing so I have to flip to the original invoicing to complete my monthly accounts.
Also the the performance is terrible, I am running on an I9 Processor Computer, 32 GB RAM, SSD hard drive and a 1TB internet connection and it is very slow.
Having the approve button at the top is great if it's a small one line invoice, if you have a large invoice with multiple lines it slows you down having to scroll back up to the top to approve and send.
PLEASE DO NOT GET RID OF THE OLD INVOICING IT IS ONE OF XERO'S BEST FEATURES!
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Nathan Lang commented
We're still waiting on some further feedback or updates since the 12/09/24 post Kelly. The 4,000 character limit is a real issue!
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Steve Dangerfield commented
Please implement this, 4000 characters isn't enough, and I'll have to move my invoicing elsewhere...
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Nathan Lang commented
How is this progressing Kelly Munro? Appreciate that there's been an extension on the use of the 'Classic' invoicing, but I can see that this issue will still exist when that is turned off unless the amendment is made (i.e. removing the character limit).
An update would be great thanks.
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Nathan Lang commented
Can we have an update on this Kelly.
I've just run the invoices for the month (last week), and it took a day longer than usual because I had to manually split Descriptions across numerous line items to get under the imposed 4,000 character limit.
We really need this limit removed in the new invoicing (same as the old invoicing).
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Helen Shadbolt commented
This is going to become extremely inconvenient when old invoicing is turned off, as I often duplicate previous invoices. Any new invoices created in old invoicing won't be able to be saved and I will have to get someone in the office to split content onto multiple lines as I can't drag and drop lines from an ipad. Not sure why there needs to be a character limit?
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Nathan Lang commented
I completely agree with Jett - this is a massive step backwards for our companies' ability to invoice and is extremely frustrating and time consuming.
I've just been through the transition from Workflow Max to Workflow Max 2 (by Bluerock) and that was difficult, but non-action on this issue will be far more problematic for our business, in what seems an easy fix, to a rather large step backwards in functionality in the invoicing within Xero.
Please make this a high priority to resolve.
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Nathan Lang commented
Also - what happened to the ability to add 5, 10 or 15 rows??? Where has that option gone?
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Nathan Lang commented
When we import form Workflow Max we very often have entries with more than 4000 characters pulling through onto a line item (timesheet entries). I've just had to split one of these entries in Xero across numerous line items to make it save, and instead of the invoice taking me 2-3 minutes, it took me 20mins!!! This is incredibly inefficient, and I would really like this reversed back to how we've had for the last 8 years I've been using WFM and Xero. Invoicing is a time consuming activity, and my company simply cannot afford the increased inefficeny that this invoicing change has resulted in.
This is urgent please!!!
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Darryl Hunter commented
In response to Jett Benson, what other functionality will users lose? The reference field for an invoice has been reduced to 255 characters. This is going to cause me a lot of grief when forced to move to New Invoicing as I have been forced to put id information in the reference field because it's not practical to search and find an invoice by text in the description.
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Jett Benson commented
@Kelly M, in addition to the 4,000 character description limit per line, what other restrictions are you forcing on us when you remove the functional 'classic invoicing'?
Do you have a list of what functionality us users will lose or are we expected to find out for ourselves when things don't work as well as they used to?
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Jett Benson commented
This is essential for our business also. This is where we record works carried out, sometimes over multiple weeks or months and therefore can't afford to be limited on characters.
How a 'new' invoicing system can be developed that includes a reduction in features is beyond me.
Often we required 10,000 characters but on occasion have needed up to 30,000.
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Melissa Fowler commented
We also need a much larger character limit due to our invoicing needs. This means larger invoices will need to be split across multiple invoices which is a huge step backwards in functionality. Why was it limited to 4000 characters anyway?
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Sarah Nicholls commented
Hi,
We import from an excel monthly spreadsheet some requiring 15,000 characters or more.
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Rachel Bedgood commented
This is vital to us!!!